Friday, September 30, 2011

AVWW Betas 0.508-0.509, "Walls? What Walls?," Released!

These two releases are a couple of the coolest ones we've done yet, in terms of improving the overall feel of the game. There were a few ongoing gripes that a lot of players had, and we've addressed all the most persistent ones here:

Guardian stones now give you warp potions instead of warp scrolls, and refresh you back up to 4 instead of 2. The reason the change to potions is significant is that means you can still get refreshed to 4 potions if you've crafted some "extra" warp scrolls of your own.

Hit detection on melee combat is vastly better.

Bats can no longer go through walls, nor can spells like ice cross or circle of fire. This makes it so that you can actually take cover behind walls in all cases, and it makes terrain more tactical for all enemies. It also prevents players from being able to exploit ice cross or similar against bosses.

The power of healing potions/scrolls has been quadrupled, and the power of magic restoration potions/scrolls has been doubled. Magic potions also have their own cooldown, rather than causing a cooldown on all logistical spells. The difficulty had been creeping up in recent versions, but this gets it back into a better-balanced level.

Monster nests no longer respawn except in boss rooms. So if you take the time to clear out a room of monster nests, you can go back in without fear. Handy for exploration in buildings in particular!

The speed of enemy projectiles gets slowed down substantially (or sped up a little) depending on what action difficulty setting you choose.

In the strategic/citybuilding parts of the game, we've done a massive overhaul of how NPC actions are taken. Now actions cost time units, and NPCs each have a certain amount of time units they can spend per turn. Before it was a flat one action per turn, which really was not very kind when it came to lower-value actions that were needed but which would consume an entire action for that NPC.

The Ilari now provide protection from the ambient heat/cold in settlements and similar, so you don't have to worry about your new character dying from exposure while you rush to craft a snowsuit.

A variety of smaller physics improvements and fixes make playing as a bat smoother, flying enemies work better around walls, things like amoeba shots and tidal pulse slide along the floor, and so on.

And those are just the highlights, there was a lot of other smaller stuff, too. More coming later tonight -- and now that we're getting out of the territory of so many of these more core refinements based on the increased player feedback, we'll be able to do more in terms of new spells and enemies and such coming up, too. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you
launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found
if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.